The first half of this rundown covered the seven tools that build an arrow and true it downrange — Builder, Spine, Recommender, Chrono, Sight Tape, Shot Solver, Range. Those are the ones most people open first. But The Forge has another six tabs, and they're not filler. They're the bench work, the archer work, and the reference material that the flashy tools quietly depend on. Here's the rest of it.
Armory — every setup on one rack
The Builder makes one arrow. The Armory holds all of them. Every build you save lands here on a single rack where you can line them up and grade them against each other — weight, FOC, spine, speed, side by side — then load any one back into the Builder with a tap and go.
I built it because nobody who's serious shoots one arrow for everything. You've got a heavy, forgiving whitetail build for the treestand and a flatter, faster build for the long stuff — and without somewhere to keep them straight, you end up rebuilding the same arrow from memory every spring and getting a slightly different answer each time. The Armory is the memory. It's also where you settle a decision honestly: put your two candidate builds next to each other and the trade-offs stop being a feeling and start being a table.
Get your money's worth by actually naming your builds for the job — "stand 20-40," "target 100," "elk backup" — so when the season flips you load the right one instead of guessing. It's the least glamorous tab and the one that saves you the most time over a year.
Tune — the right steps, in the right order
Tune is the bench wizard, and it's the one that keeps every other tool honest. It walks you through a real tuning session in the sequence that actually works: preflight and grip first, cam timing and sync, tiller, nocking point and D-loop, center shot, rest, then bareshaft and paper and broadhead groups at the end. Each step knows your specific bow — the factory draw-stop and timing specs are baked in — so you're checking against the right numbers instead of a generic rule of thumb.
I built it because tuning order is where most people wreck themselves. Hang paper first, chase the tear with your rest, and you'll bury a timing problem or a weak arrow under a rest position that lies at six feet and betrays you at fifty. There's a whole Field Notes piece on why paper is the last step, not the first — the Tune wizard is that philosophy turned into a checklist you can't skip ahead in. It enforces the sequence so the bow is mechanically right before you ever start adjusting for symptoms.
This one underwrites both of my shots. A bow that's actually in tune shoots broadheads with field points for the short shot, and holds a group at distance for the long one — and you can't fake either past 50 yards. Run the whole wizard once at the start of the season and again any time you change a string, a rest, or an arrow. It's a Hunter-tier tool, and it's the one I'd tell a new shooter to spend the upgrade on first.
Coach — the tool that trains you, not the arrow
Every other tab makes the equipment better. Coach makes the shooter better. It's drills, hold timers, shot clocks, and conditioning work — structured practice for the part of the system standing behind the string.
I built it because I got tired of watching people spend two thousand dollars getting their gear perfect and then miss because they couldn't hold at full draw or they rushed the shot. The arrow doesn't care how good it is if you punch the trigger. The hold timer and shot clock in particular are the ones I lean on, and they map straight onto the two shots. For the short shot, set a shot clock and practice drawing, settling, and executing under a countdown — that's the whitetail-in-the-lane scenario, and the pressure is the whole point. For the long game, the hold timer builds the steadiness a hundred-yard shot demands; if you can't sit rock-still at full draw for a slow count, distance will expose it every time.
Use it like a gym program, not a toy. A few structured minutes of hold and clock work before you start flinging arrows does more for your groups than the last hour of a mindless practice session ever will.
Physics — the whole engine, exposed
Most of The Forge hides the math behind a clean answer. The Physics tab is where you open the hood and look at all of it — the full ballistics, the complete spine breakdown, the trajectory tables, the wind drift and penetration and energy numbers laid out in detail. It's the expert tab, off by default, for when "trust me" isn't enough and you want to see the work.
I built it because our audience is archnerds, and archnerds don't want a black box. When the Builder tells you an arrow reads slightly weak, the Physics tab shows you exactly why — the effective draw weight, the chart window, every term that went into it. It's also where the long-range obsessives live, because trajectory and wind drift are where a hundred-yard shot is won or lost, and this is where you can study them number by number instead of just reading the verdict.
Best benefit: use it to learn, not just to check. Change one input at a time and watch which numbers move and by how much. Do that for an afternoon and you'll understand your own arrow better than most people at your range understand theirs.
Database — the catalog with the specs that matter
The Database is exactly what it sounds like: every shaft, point, insert, nock, and vane in the catalog, browsable with the real numbers attached — spine, grains per inch, outer diameter, insert compatibility, the specs you actually need instead of marketing copy.
I built it because component shopping is a mess of tabs and PDFs and forum guesses, and half the specs you need to build a good arrow are buried three clicks deep on a manufacturer's site or missing entirely. Pulling it into one place with consistent, verified numbers means you can answer "will this insert fit that shaft" or "what's the GPI on this in a 300 spine" in one look — and because it's the same data the Builder and Recommender run on, what you browse is exactly what you'll build with. No drift between the catalog and the calculator.
Use it as your reference when you're spec'ing a new build from scratch, or just to sanity-check a component before you buy. It's the boring backbone that makes the smart tools trustworthy.
Compete — for the ones keeping score
The last tab is for target archers. Compete has a competition picker, an NTS coach mode built on the National Training System shot sequence, and an equipment compliance checker so you don't show up to a shoot with a rig that's illegal for your class.
I built it because the target world runs on rules that the hunting world never thinks about — arrow diameter limits, sight and stabilizer restrictions, class definitions that vary by organization — and finding out your setup is non-compliant at the shooting line is a miserable way to learn. The compliance checker heads that off. The NTS coach mode, meanwhile, is for building a repeatable shot process, which is the entire game once distance and scorecards are involved.
This is the most niche tab, and it leans toward the target and long-range side of the house rather than hunting — which, given that long-range precision is my favorite corner of archery, is exactly the crowd I wanted to take care of. If you're shooting paper and steel for score, start here before your first registered event. It's Hunter-tier, and it'll save you an embarrassing walk back to the truck.
The whole bench
Put both halves together and the shape of the thing is clear: the first seven tools build, verify, and aim an arrow; these six manage your setups, tune the bow underneath them, sharpen the archer, expose the math, back it all with real data, and keep you legal at a shoot. Nothing in there is decoration. Every tab earned its spot by solving a problem I hit on my own bench or in the field, usually the hard way.
If you've only ever opened the Builder, you're using a fraction of what's there. Go poke the other tabs — especially Tune and Coach, the two that make the biggest difference and get opened the least.